|
||||||||||
If you are one of the three out of four Americans, who according to surveys crave greater knowledge of how to manage their personal finances in general and credit cards specifically, here is one unexpected resource: credit card companies.
Most credit card companies offer an excellent array of tools and resources to help consumers understand and manage credit and their personal finances better. The best sites take this one step further, making financial education fun and entertaining through videos, online financial games, and interactive tools. Here is a sampling of some of the better financial education sites:
Visa’s Practical Money Skills
Visa is the largest electronic payment processing system in the world with lots of resources to spend, and it shows. This site offers extensive resources, not just for credit card management, but for everything pertaining to personal finances, including planning for college, investment basics, advice for landing a job, finding the best elderly care for again parents, and much more. While the site, not surprisingly, has a definite Visa slant, it excels with its numerous fun, creative resources, which offer a new spin on money matters. A series of educational games aim to make finances fun; adults and kids alike can test their financial savvy on interactive financial games, such as the Financial Football Training Camp, Ed’s Bank, or the “Smart Money Quiz Show.”
MasterCard’s Priceless Pointers
Just how priceless MasterCard’s pointers are is for users to decide, however, this site does offer a number of innovative features to help make financial education more exciting and accessible. Users can view videos that give advice on how to make budgets work, safer online shopping, and more. Interactive tools help users figure out how much they can spend each month without compromising their long-term financial goals or let consumers calculate how much they can save by paying off credit card debt and other types of loans faster.
Discover Financial Education Tools
Discover Financial Services recently added a “Straight Talk” section to their financial education section to help card members better understand the new credit card landscape. The new program features a wide range of basic information, including videos reviewing the recent credit card changes introduced by the Credit CARD Act, including changes to statements, over-limit fees, and the allocation of credit card payments, and a series of articles on a variety of credit card-related topics.
Also useful are a number of free online credit card tools, which can assist cardholders with managing their credit card spending and credit card debt. For example, if you are looking to keep better track of your expenditures, an easy-to-use tool offers a visual tracking system to compare card spending from month to month. If you want help structuring a debt-payoff plan, a “pay-down planner” can help you calculate how long it will take you to pay off your credit card debt under different scenarios. Discover also offers helpful advice on how to navigate the challenging economic environment.
Chase’s “Clear and Simple”
This site likewise is a broad personal finance site, catering to a wide range of consumers with different needs. In addition to the interactive features, what makes this site useful is that the information is organized according to different demographic groups, which makes it very easy to find the resources pertaining to users’ specific financial needs. Different sections focus on financial advice for young professionals, new families, members of the military looking to make important financial decisions before deployment, or seniors looking to make the most out of their retirement savings. For cardholders looking for help with things from budgeting their family finances to consolidating small business debt, the site provides a variety of helpful tools and calculators.
In addition, while the financial education website resources differ from card issuer to card issuer, the website of almost all card issuers give cardholders the option to create reports of past credit card charges organized by category. This is a basic financial management tool, which can be extremely useful for keeping track of where your money goes and curtailing expenses.
